In 1999 I became fascinated by ASCII, typewriter and teletype art, witch seemed to have found its way into internet subculture. This form of internet subculture developed alongside emoticons and dingbats as a way to codify information. ASCII was originally developed by Bob Bemer and IBM in 1963. Before the advent of ASCII most computers had proprietary ways of communicating and ASCII revolutionized everything. Without this breakthrough we wouldn't have e-mail, the World Wide Web, cursor movement, laser printers. ASCII art was an appropriate way of showing the waring influences within an industry that has its own heros and mythologies - furthermore the work started out digital and ended up being printed with an antiquated HP deskjet 500. ASCII was a way of showing the limitations of chronicling the progression and development of the computer using finite means. In this case the representations were broken down into bits of type – Hartling, five point, mono-spaced san serif type, to be specific, and were subject to an evaluation criteria. The materials I used in the production also seemed appropriate – plastic, aluminum, paper printouts and metal screws all used in the computer industry and most of which are 20th century materials. The work plays off the idea that a typographic character is, in fact, an image and yet can be part of a larger image that has an entirely different reading.

In August of 2000, I completed a body of 96 works of (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) ASCII art, appropriate for the end of the millennium. For this body of work, I culled images from the web related to the historical figures who influenced the development of the personal computer. The 96 images were printed with a DeskJet 500 printer, and mounted on aluminium plates. The work plays off the idea that a typographic character is in fact a visual character and yet can be part of a larger image. By October I was ready to show the 126 characters that made up the final show.

ASCII works by assigning standard numeric values to letters, numbers, punctuation marks and other characters such as control codes. An uppercase “A” - for example, is represented by the number 65. Out of the 128 characters 32 through 126 are the only visible characters on a standard keyboard. Hence the use of the numbering scheme I used to create the portraits which were alphabetically arranged by last name and divided into two groups – hardware and software contributions.

The difficulties faced were ever present. It was soon evident that the decisions on who to include became problematic. There were people that contributed greatly to pc development that were not properly represented on the web – especially the women who played important roles in software and hardware development. I used these "random" searches on the web (google at the time in 1999) as a feminist critique of the industry. Along with the pitfalls there were often surprises while creating the work. One of the surprises came when I realized that some of the images that were culled from the web were 72dpi, 100dpi, 150 and so on, but once they were broken down into type they became unified. Strung end to end these strings of text would reveal nothing recognizable save the text itself. Most notable icons were Ada Lovelace, who was considered to be the first software developer creating a “plan” for Babbage’s difference engine (1830’s). Grace Hopper, the developer of Cobal, was also instrumental in the early Harvard Mark I computer development and coined the term “bug” when a moth disrupted calculations in the Mark 2.